I have the Delta 22-580 lunch box planer. I got it as a hand me down and it seemed to work great until last week when it quit on me. I figured it might be the brushes and sure enough they were really worn down. I ordered a new set and installed them YESTERDAY. Planer seemed to be running well again except for a somewhat scary scratchy noise. I just figured that noise was a part of wearing in the new brushes. Well, my planer just died again today after maybe 2 to 3 hours of use on the new brushes. The have worn down to about 5/16” from about 5/8” yesterday.

Is this normal?

Surely I don’t need to be replacing these things after 4 hours of use? The initial ones probably lasted about 20 to 30 hours…

Thanks,

Dave

-- The Wood Is Your Oyster

6 replies so far

Sounds to me like the armature is damaged and wearing the brushes out. If the original brushes wore down to the armature it might need to be resurfaced or replaced because of scoring. Similar to the rotors or drums on your car’s brakes.

Please excuse my lack of knowledge, but what is the armature? I can look into the slot where the brushes were and see that something does not look right, at least it doesn’t look the same when you look down each brush slot. I assume that this may be the armature.

An update: I just tried to smooth these brushes out and put them back in. They ran for about 20 seconds before both brushes broke apart and the motor died. Does this help figure anything out?

Wow…I have had that planer for about 10 years now, have run several hundred bd ft of lumber through it and have never even thought about the brushes. I would suspect bearings. That said, some brushes are beveled and have to be installed in one way only. I doubt that is your problem though. Back to bad bearings I think.

Thanks Michael for clarifing. Yes, the brushes ride on the commutator which is part of the armature. It really sounds as if the commutator is damaged. Either it was damaged by the old brushes or the new ones weren’t run in properly. It’s also poossible as teejk says that they needed to be installed in a certain direction.

teejk – If it were bad bearings, more than likely the noise would have been there before changing the brushes. The bad bearings wouldn’t cause the new brushes to wear that quickly. If they were that bad the planer would probably destroy itself while running.

Yeah. I let the new brushes run with no load for 10 minutes or so. I noticed the scratchy sound when I put the new brushes in. And then it just sort of got worse until the brushes crumbled. I am kind of thinking it might be time to hit craigslist. There is a point of futility, and I think I am at the threshold. It’d probably be 150 or 200 bucks to fix from what it sounds like.